WoW – More fun together!

Tanking Shannox, trap timing

If you are a tank who is still wiping on Shannox or it seems overly hard, READ THIS.

I thought this was obvious but the offtank we had last night clearly did not get it. Look, the goal of tanking the add is to clear stacks; the stacks of the off tank and the stacks of the main tank. There is only one way to do this ‘right’. To clear your stacks you want to have as much time as possible with the dog not hitting you… that clears the off tank stacks. But you ALSO need as much time as possible with the boss NOT HITTING THE MAIN TANK WITH HIS SPEAR.

That is, you wait until the spear throw is starting and you trap the dog THEN. This gives you two segments of time for your stacks to drop. The first segment is the time the dog is in the trap and the second segment is the time for the dog to grab the spear and run it back to the boss. If you, the off tank, just trap the dog over and over, like our offtank did last night then you MIGHT get lucky. If you get lucky the dog will come out of the trap just as the spear throw happens. If that happens you will get both of those segments of time back to back. You will have the dog in the trap (not hitting you) followed by the dog running with the spear (not hitting you). If there is no gap between those two then you end up with plenty of time to clear you stacks. That is if you are lucky. If you time it wrong the dog hits you between those two (before running to the spear) and your stacks are refreshed.

If you trap the dog BEFORE the spear throw then the main tank gets NO extra time to clear his stacks. You might as well not be trapping the dog at all from the MT perspective because if you just stood there and tanked him the MT would get the SAME amount of time to clear stacks. That time the MT gets will ONLY be the time for the dog running to the spear. What the MT needs is for the time when the boss does NOT have the spear to be prolonged as much as possible. This ONLY happens when you trap the dog just as the spear is thrown. Not just before. Not well before. The boss has to not have the spear in his hand while the dog is in the trap. His spear has to be stuck in the ground while the dog is trapped. This and only this will give the MT a safe margin of time to clear stacks.

If you, the off tank, just chain trap the dog, and you get lucky, then you might clear your stacks every time. The main tank, if he gets lucky and kites the boss a very long way, and someone is slowing the dog (like a frost mage), then the main tank MIGHT get lucky and clear his stacks. Or the MT might regularly get to 10-11 stacks like I was doing last night.

Remember the dog gets a debuff from getting trapped. You should ONLY be trapping the dog right as the spear throw goes off. It is very easy. Find a trap. Stand next to it while tanking the dog. When the red mark appears for the spear throw, run around the trap in a tight circle just far enough away that you don’t trigger it. Done! Yeah, if you just trap that dog over and over like a moron you might get lucky sometimes and occasionally down the boss. Even a blind squirrel sometimes finds a nut.

It amazes me how many people out there completely fail to understand a fights mechanics but sometimes still manage to down things. I think it is tragic that they will never get what they were doing wrong and will still get stuff down. Is it elitist of me to not like nerfing things until the clueless get them down? Oh well. Then paint me as a wanna-be elitist.

So I have to disagree with my wife. Yeah you have to ‘handle the mechanics’ but only sort-of. That off tank was doing the dog as wrong has he could have possibly done it without trapping himself. And we still got the boss down…

Of course that was just the first boss. We tried Beth a couple times and that was beyond bad.

It was not that he was super stupid but he just plain did not understand the fight mechanic. The kind of understanding that does not just jump out of a video and pop in your head. He did not have the understanding that you get from putting in some real serious attempts with your brain fully engaged.

Yup. The tank healing was great! I was very impressed. I hit 10 stacks many times and you would never have known it by watching my health bar.
We did have a problem with burst damage. That Rageface move was killing people. But with two shaman and a druid that didn’t use his full toolbox we were really short of short cast hard hitting heals. Mainly just a class blance thing.

That was the other problem with what that tank was doing. If you chain trap after the first dog is down and the boss is at 35… what do people dps? NOTHING! They have to keep breaking your stupid dog out so they can damage it!